His rapid rise irked colleagues, who saw him as leapfrogging others, said Christopher K. Johnson, a former senior CIA China analyst and now the head of China Strategies Group, a consultancy.

He earned Xi’s trust as head of protocol for the Foreign Ministry from 2014 to 2017. In that role, he was responsible for the minutiae of burnishing Xi’s image on the world stage. Before the Chinese president visited Belarus in 2015, Qin demanded a 2am visit to a museum on the itinerary where he counted steps, according to a former Belarusian diplomat. His wife, Lin Yan, befriended Xi’s wife and made mooncakes for her, one US official said.

Qin was promoted to vice minister of foreign affairs in 2018 and then ambassador to the United States in 2021, a position he held for only 18 months before returning to Beijing to become China’s youngest foreign minister since the 1950s.

Qin’s rapid ascension was perhaps the most prominent among a younger generation of aggressive diplomats often known as “wolf warriors”, after a proudly nationalist Chinese action blockbuster from 2017. He was “an early adopter” of the aggressive style of diplomacy, earning favour with Xi, Johnson said. “This guy was a wolf warrior before it was cool to be a wolf warrior.”

From day one as foreign minister, Qin positioned himself as the lead enforcer of Xi’s diplomatic agenda, not as lieutenant to Wang, who had been promoted to director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission and technically outranked him.

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During his first major news conference, in March 2023, Qin channelled Xi, who warned days earlier of “containment” by Washington, with blunt remarks about a coming confrontation with the US.

Current and former US officials who have dealt with Qin describe an individual who lacked the diplomatic finesse of more experienced colleagues and found it difficult to switch out of “wolf warrior” mode.

One tense moment came in August 2022 when Qin was Beijing’s ambassador in Washington. Then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi had just left Taiwan, completing a two-day trip despite Beijing’s vociferous objections to a high-ranking US official visiting the island, a self-governed democracy that China claims as its own. Senior Biden administration officials were meeting with Qin during that period, sometimes twice daily, to try to prevent the crisis from spiralling into conflict. It was the only senior-level channel between Beijing and Washington at the time, making it particularly crucial.

The officials made it clear that the US was not seeking confrontation but would respond if the Chinese took aggressive measures. After Pelosi left, China reacted by firing missiles into the waters around Taiwan, and the White House summoned the ambassador. In one fraught exchange, one official recalled, Qin made what appeared to be a threat about China “erasing the median line”, referring to an unofficial boundary down the middle of the strait separating China from Taiwan that both sides had long observed to maintain stability.

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His statement alarmed the US officials, who saw it as escalatory and pressed to know whether this was an official position. Qin responded with a “performative” tirade on the affront Pelosi’s mission represented to China, a second official said.

“This is not the time for polemics,” then-White House Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell said, according to the official. “It’s a moment for precision.”

Qin’s time in the spotlight was brief. He disappeared from public view five months after becoming foreign minister, setting off a cascade of rumours about his downfall.

He was formally dismissed in July last year after only 207 days in the job. Wang, 70, returned to replace his successor as foreign minister.

It has been unclear what led to Qin’s ouster. A leading theory among political analysts of China is that he had an extramarital affair with a well-known Chinese television journalist, Fu Xiaotian, and the couple had a child out of wedlock born in the US.

Because censors closely guard the private lives of top officials, personal indiscretion is rarely seen as a serious offence in the male-dominated world of Chinese politics.

But Fu’s celebrity lifestyle, including social media posts about meeting world leaders and travelling on private jets with her infant son, made the affair a potential security vulnerability for China, analysts said. Rumours circulated that Beijing suspected she had been passing secrets to a foreign intelligence service, but they have never been substantiated. Fu, like Qin, has been absent from public life for over a year.

In July, the ruling Communist Party summarily dismissed from the 205-member Central Committee several officials, including the former defence minister, who had been investigated for corruption. But Qin, the readout stated, had merely “resigned” from the committee. He remained a “comrade” – a member of the Communist Party – hinting at a milder punishment.

It was the first sign that Qin was indeed alive.

“The Politburo crediting Qin with the title of ‘comrade’ indicates that he has not been expelled from the party and could be reassigned to a new, lower-ranking role,” said Neil Thomas, an expert on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank.

“In the Xi era, similar demotions have been meted out to leading cadres found guilty of relatively minor political infractions,” Thomas said.

Qin’s apparent demotion follows a precedent set by Shen Guofang, a former assistant foreign minister who was abruptly reassigned in 2005 to a job as editor-in-chief at World Affairs Press. No reason was given for his move, but it was rumoured that he was being punished for an affair. Shen nonetheless kept a public profile in his new job, giving regular speeches and interviews, in which he has claimed to have no idea why he was reassigned.

Questioned about Shen’s transfer at the time, Qin, who was then the Foreign Ministry spokesman, called it “routine”.

World Affairs Press is located in an alley in central Beijing and has a bookstore open to the public. It consists of a small room stocked with Chinese diplomat memoirs and books by Xi Jinping. When a reporter visited the bookshop this week, employees said they had not heard of Qin working at the publishing house. A receptionist who answered the phone said she did not know whether it was true.

A former translator for top Chinese leaders, Victor Gao, was recently pressed on Qin’s whereabouts in an interview with Al Jazeera.

“He is somewhere in China,” said Gao, who is now vice president of the Centre for China and Globalisation think tank. “You will never see him.”